When the case is litigious, the ombudsman will be in charge of educating CheckUsers or others about the Foundation's privacy policy. When the Privacy Policy, Access to Nonpublic Information Policy, CheckUser Policy, or Oversight policy have been breached, the Ombudsman Commission should report to the Executive Director or designated staff and recommend a course of action (such as removal of access to tools). Additionally, the commission might suggest suitable changes to policies or software.

Neutrality

An ombudsman's investigation should be conducted in a manner determined by the ombudsman to ensure fairness and impartiality. As a general guideline, it is best that ombudsmen avoid conflicts of interest as much as possible, particularly by avoiding routine use of CheckUser or oversight access and not processing complaints on the projects on which they are very active editors. However, matters that come before the commission are not clearcut, and the language and culture of various projects may pose barriers to outsiders. As such, how the commission investigates complaints is left to the discretion of its appointed members.

Contact

Ombudsman requests may be made to the following email address (preferably in a language spoken by one of the members):

cu-ombuds-llists.wikimedia.org

Membership

Members of the ombudsman commission are selected by Wikimedia Foundation officials from the Wikimedia community. A call for volunteers is issued each year in early December on the Wikimedia-L mailing list and on the talk page of this policy, as well as other project forums as appropriate. They are appointed (assuming they agree) for a period of approximately one year. An ombudsman's real identity must be disclosed to the Foundation legal counsel. A non-voting alternate member may be appointed to serve for one year, with an expectation for a seat as a full member the following year.

Assigned rights

Ombudsmen have the following rights globally:

Search deleted pages (browsearchive)

Check user's IP addresses and other information (checkuser)

View the checkuser log (checkuser-log)

View deleted history entries, without their associated text (deletedhistory)

Please inform us if your wiki has an Arbitration Committee (or a similar committee) and if you have reached them (or used other dispute resolution procedure customary to your community) before reaching the Ombudsman Commission. Provide a link to the relevant case page if appropriate.

Processing/Reporting

Cases brought to our attention will be processed the following way:

Confirmation of the request: we will send a notice of confirmation to the requester, and if necessary ask for further information.

Scope: if the request is within the scope of the ombudsman commission, we will do the investigation, if not we will decline the request and try to direct the complainor to a better place to get help for his/her individual problem.

Investigation: We do whatever is necessary to find out whether or not there was a breach of the policies or a non-compliance or conflict of local policies with the global ones.

Result: We give the result of our investigation to the requester, and if there was indeed a breach of the privacy policy, we will inform the user who was investigated and if necessary inform the Board of Trustees and if necessary recommend removing CU or steward rights from the user breaking the policy.